5 ms·

A few years ago I bought a switch that could rack mount and ended up looking at getting a rack to put most of my stuff in. I quickly abandoned that idea when I

by ziml77 4y ago

A few years ago I bought a switch that could rack mount and ended up looking at getting a rack to put most of my stuff in. I quickly abandoned that idea when I saw that rack mount makes things cost significantly more. I remember that the UPS pricing was especially nasty. Felt like they were just charging what they could get away with considering that it's really only businesses buying rack mount equipment. Though if I ever buy I house I might end up going Linus level crazy and put a rack in the basement or a utlity room with fiber optic cabling back to my desk for peripherals to attach.

hashhar 4y ago
A nice compromise is to buy a tower UPS - the ones which are deeper but not as high - and then place them on a cantilever shelf on the rack. Mine occupies 3U of rack space and I can even place my NAS on the shelf in front of the UPS.
aftbit 4y ago
On the other hand, surplus rack mount servers are very cheap on eBay. You can certainly stick non-rack UPSes into a rack. I did this for about a year (two APCs sitting at the bottom of the rack) before I got a great deal on some surplus rackmount UPSes.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  Yeah; buying new is extremely expensive. Many cities have an e-waste recycler from whom you can get great deals (otherwise browse Craigslist and Marketplace, there are good deals (sometimes free) on older equipment. For UPSes, a reputable brand (like APC) will still function fine but might need new batteries, which are a lot cheaper than a whole UPS.
  - ziml77 4y ago
    That's a great point about a second-hand UPS. My mind has been tainted by all the non-removable batteries inside consumer products so I completely forgot that a worn-out battery on an old UPS is easy to replace.
  - Brybry 4y ago
    Where do you get new UPS batteries for cheap? I haven't shopped rackmount UPS before but for lower end consumer APC UPS the official batteries from Amazon or the APC website are often the same price or more expensive than a whole new APC UPS from a slickdeals-spotted sale.
    - runjake 4y ago
      https://www.batteriesplus.com/battery/ups https://www.batteriesplus.com/battery/ups
    - radus 4y ago
      https://excessups.com/ https://excessups.com/ sells batteries and UPS units. The downside is they can be quite slow to ship.
Lammy 4y ago
> I saw that rack mount makes things cost significantly more Double-edged sword. Higher prices brand new, but vastly cheaper used if you chase companies' deprecation cycles.
- dicknuckle 4y ago
  Often free if you have friends in IT who would rather give things away than get $1/lb from recycling stuff that works.
- icelancer 4y ago
  Absolutely. Many small businesses are powered by two-generations-ago rack mounted appliances and blades. It's often the most cost effective way to get redundant and A+A power supplies in servers that you need to protect beyond simple UPS methods. Source: Loving the 2U and 4U blades with 2017-2020 era EPYC and Xeon processors with dirt-cheap Tesla P40 24GB VRAM GPUs in them for inference and all sorts of compute loads.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    There’s no such thing as a 2u blade, blade servers are a different thing than #u “pizza boxes”. Generally speaking they’re chassis mounted servers with shared power and I/O through mezzanine cards/backplanes(yes there are blades without shared power and/or I/O, but they’re the exception). https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/0/872/ENUSAG12-0260/index.html https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ss...
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      4U blade enclosures are indeed more common, but 2U enclosures absolutely are such a thing. One example: https://www.trentonsystems.com/products/rugged-blade-servers/2u-rugged-blade-servers https://www.trentonsystems.com/products/rugged-blade-servers...
      - Godel_unicode 4y ago
dylan604 4y ago
>I saw that rack mount makes things cost significantly more. there's a logical reason for this though. it's a pretty safe assumption that you're in a larger facility if you're rack mounting. a lot of rack mount chasis come with features like dual PSUs and other redundant features. redundancy does cost. >put a rack in the basement or a utlity room They make enclosures[0] that are smaller than a full rack, but allow for rack mounting equipment. you can then just shove this enclosure on a shelf or wherever. much more convenient than a full on server rack. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Mount-Server-Rack-Cabinet/dp/B0721XSYZJ/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=computer+enclosure+cabinet&qid=1676573324&s=electronics&sprefix=computer+enclosu%2Celectronics%2C114&sr=1-4 https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Mount-Server-Rack-Cabinet/dp/B07...
- amelius 4y ago
  Another reason is that it's targeted at businesses, not consumers.
- ziml77 4y ago
  In most cases I do agree the extra price is there for a reason. It was specifically the UPSes that seemed absurd. And the reason I would put the equipment in another room would be to keep the heat away from the living space. A basement would be especially good for that since it's natually a cooler area. Still good to know about the smaller racks though. My bank account is much healthier than the last time I looked into rack mounting so I might actually get one that size for my apartment now. It would really neaten things up.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I bought one (probably not the exact one i linked) for mounting a UPS and a home security camera DVR unit (I don't buy into the security as a service from all of those options), but it never got installed. So the DVR/UPS just sit stacked on a shelf unprotected, but that's what the missus wanted. So now it's that thing that just sits there taking up space that is hard to sell at a garage sale, and I can't be bothered to create an ebay account to sell it. Also, even if you don't have rack mount equipment, they make the shelves you can attach to the rack mounts and set other gear on them. So yeah, you can really clean some stuff up with these.
deeesstoronto 4y ago
I've had a bunch of APC SmartUPS 1500 in both tower and rack formats. I found the batteries in the rack version, where batteries lay on their sides, reach end of life much sooner than the tower version, where batteries are upright. It's likely poorer heat dissipation/ventilation in the rack version, but may have to do with battery orientation. The rack version also seems to suffer corrosion damage from battery off-gasing if batteries reach critical failure and overheat. I haven't seen the same damage on the tower units. Again some combination of orientation and ventilation.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  I could believe the consumer models are actually built to a higher standard. A rack mount unit is likely going to be climate controlled, minimal vibration, actively monitored, etc. The consumer units will be subjected to all manners of hell: pet hair, zero ventilation, installed and forgotten. Nobody wants the UPS to burn down the house.
  - metadat 4y ago
    In my experience, server grade stuff tends to be significantly more reliable (as long as it doesn't become infested with insects or something odd like that :p). My consumer machines are generally flaky as hell in comparison.. maybe partly due to windows and gfx card drivers? Ymmv.
- yardie 4y ago
  The batteries are sealed lead acid AGMs. Where orientation isn't a concern because the electrolyte is gelified in fiberglass. Also, they shouldn't be off-gassing at all. That's the sealed part. I've had SLA batteries puff up. And if you are getting corrosion in and around the AP chassis you may have a leak. Typically, what determines the life of these batteries is # of cycles and # of deep discharges. The more extreme the environment the shorter the life time. I have network equipment sit outdoors in a cabinet. The batteries typically last 24-36 months instead of the 48-60 months I see from indoor UPSes.
  - 4y ago
mindslight 4y ago
In my personal computing experience, the main value of a rack is still the density, as it is in the datacenter. Moving one or two ATX PCs, a UPS, and switch into a half height rack isn't that much of a win (compared to the floor and/or basic shelving). But double that much into a full height rack is. You don't need strictly rackmount hardware either. I just have a pair of non-rack SUA1500's sitting next to one another on the solid bottom built into the rack (not even a movable shelf). The battery type is much more common than the rackmount versions. Case wise I'd just recommend 4U all the way for full size cards, coolers, and fans. Smaller fans make more noise. Also just spend the money on cases with hot swap disk bays for any machine you plan to have more than a few drives. You'll end up wanting them sooner or later, and it's nicer to run the SATA cabling once with how cramped rack cases can get in places.
kobalsky 4y ago
> when I saw that rack mount makes things cost significantly more no way, are you telling me that a $180 rackable shelf is a scam? https://www.rackmountsolutions.net/fixed-writing-shelf/ https://www.rackmountsolutions.net/fixed-writing-shelf/
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  or even the Ikea "lack rack" -- 2 x $10 ikea tables. just so happen to be the right width for servers.
outworlder 4y ago
> I quickly abandoned that idea when I saw that rack mount makes things cost significantly more. Second hand (but perfectly usable) parts. Expect more second hand enterprise items to get to the market if the economy doesn't start to boom soon. Second hand enterprise gear is usually perfectly fine in terms of longevity. Mind the noise. Get a 3d printer, print some rack adapters yourself. There's a surprising array of adapters for all sorts of devices and they work just fine for stuff that's not too heavy(like most home networking gear). If the rack itself is too expensive, you can do an Ikea Lack rack. Full size racks are easy to find (relatively, location dependent). Haven't had much luck with network racks (which was the largest my wife was comfortable with). So I bought the rack new. Still managed to fit the whole networking gear stack(none of which is racked atm, they are sitting on a rack shelf) and a ITX server (Node202, which I used as my workstation in the past, fit perfectly). You don't really want fiber optic unless you are connecting two different buildings that do not share ground. Inside the same house, ethernet works just fine. Fiber is finnicky, most home contractors don't know how to deal with it, and transceivers are expensive. More expensive than 10G usually.

by ziml77 4y ago

hashhar 4y ago

A nice compromise is to buy a tower UPS - the ones which are deeper but not as high - and then place them on a cantilever shelf on the rack. Mine occupies 3U of rack space and I can even place my NAS on the shelf in front of the UPS.

aftbit 4y ago

On the other hand, surplus rack mount servers are very cheap on eBay. You can certainly stick non-rack UPSes into a rack. I did this for about a year (two APCs sitting at the bottom of the rack) before I got a great deal on some surplus rackmount UPSes.

geerlingguy 4y ago
Yeah; buying new is extremely expensive. Many cities have an e-waste recycler from whom you can get great deals (otherwise browse Craigslist and Marketplace, there are good deals (sometimes free) on older equipment. For UPSes, a reputable brand (like APC) will still function fine but might need new batteries, which are a lot cheaper than a whole UPS.
- ziml77 4y ago
  That's a great point about a second-hand UPS. My mind has been tainted by all the non-removable batteries inside consumer products so I completely forgot that a worn-out battery on an old UPS is easy to replace.
- Brybry 4y ago
  Where do you get new UPS batteries for cheap? I haven't shopped rackmount UPS before but for lower end consumer APC UPS the official batteries from Amazon or the APC website are often the same price or more expensive than a whole new APC UPS from a slickdeals-spotted sale.
  - runjake 4y ago
    https://www.batteriesplus.com/battery/ups https://www.batteriesplus.com/battery/ups
  - radus 4y ago
    https://excessups.com/ https://excessups.com/ sells batteries and UPS units. The downside is they can be quite slow to ship.

Lammy 4y ago

> I saw that rack mount makes things cost significantly more Double-edged sword. Higher prices brand new, but vastly cheaper used if you chase companies' deprecation cycles.

dicknuckle 4y ago
Often free if you have friends in IT who would rather give things away than get $1/lb from recycling stuff that works.
icelancer 4y ago
Absolutely. Many small businesses are powered by two-generations-ago rack mounted appliances and blades. It's often the most cost effective way to get redundant and A+A power supplies in servers that you need to protect beyond simple UPS methods. Source: Loving the 2U and 4U blades with 2017-2020 era EPYC and Xeon processors with dirt-cheap Tesla P40 24GB VRAM GPUs in them for inference and all sorts of compute loads.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  There’s no such thing as a 2u blade, blade servers are a different thing than #u “pizza boxes”. Generally speaking they’re chassis mounted servers with shared power and I/O through mezzanine cards/backplanes(yes there are blades without shared power and/or I/O, but they’re the exception). https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/0/872/ENUSAG12-0260/index.html https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ss...
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    4U blade enclosures are indeed more common, but 2U enclosures absolutely are such a thing. One example: https://www.trentonsystems.com/products/rugged-blade-servers/2u-rugged-blade-servers https://www.trentonsystems.com/products/rugged-blade-servers...
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago

dylan604 4y ago

>I saw that rack mount makes things cost significantly more. there's a logical reason for this though. it's a pretty safe assumption that you're in a larger facility if you're rack mounting. a lot of rack mount chasis come with features like dual PSUs and other redundant features. redundancy does cost. >put a rack in the basement or a utlity room They make enclosures[0] that are smaller than a full rack, but allow for rack mounting equipment. you can then just shove this enclosure on a shelf or wherever. much more convenient than a full on server rack. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Mount-Server-Rack-Cabinet/dp/B0721XSYZJ/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=computer+enclosure+cabinet&qid=1676573324&s=electronics&sprefix=computer+enclosu%2Celectronics%2C114&sr=1-4 https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Mount-Server-Rack-Cabinet/dp/B07...

amelius 4y ago
Another reason is that it's targeted at businesses, not consumers.
ziml77 4y ago
In most cases I do agree the extra price is there for a reason. It was specifically the UPSes that seemed absurd. And the reason I would put the equipment in another room would be to keep the heat away from the living space. A basement would be especially good for that since it's natually a cooler area. Still good to know about the smaller racks though. My bank account is much healthier than the last time I looked into rack mounting so I might actually get one that size for my apartment now. It would really neaten things up.
- dylan604 4y ago
  I bought one (probably not the exact one i linked) for mounting a UPS and a home security camera DVR unit (I don't buy into the security as a service from all of those options), but it never got installed. So the DVR/UPS just sit stacked on a shelf unprotected, but that's what the missus wanted. So now it's that thing that just sits there taking up space that is hard to sell at a garage sale, and I can't be bothered to create an ebay account to sell it. Also, even if you don't have rack mount equipment, they make the shelves you can attach to the rack mounts and set other gear on them. So yeah, you can really clean some stuff up with these.

deeesstoronto 4y ago

I've had a bunch of APC SmartUPS 1500 in both tower and rack formats. I found the batteries in the rack version, where batteries lay on their sides, reach end of life much sooner than the tower version, where batteries are upright. It's likely poorer heat dissipation/ventilation in the rack version, but may have to do with battery orientation. The rack version also seems to suffer corrosion damage from battery off-gasing if batteries reach critical failure and overheat. I haven't seen the same damage on the tower units. Again some combination of orientation and ventilation.

0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
I could believe the consumer models are actually built to a higher standard. A rack mount unit is likely going to be climate controlled, minimal vibration, actively monitored, etc. The consumer units will be subjected to all manners of hell: pet hair, zero ventilation, installed and forgotten. Nobody wants the UPS to burn down the house.
- metadat 4y ago
  In my experience, server grade stuff tends to be significantly more reliable (as long as it doesn't become infested with insects or something odd like that :p). My consumer machines are generally flaky as hell in comparison.. maybe partly due to windows and gfx card drivers? Ymmv.
yardie 4y ago
The batteries are sealed lead acid AGMs. Where orientation isn't a concern because the electrolyte is gelified in fiberglass. Also, they shouldn't be off-gassing at all. That's the sealed part. I've had SLA batteries puff up. And if you are getting corrosion in and around the AP chassis you may have a leak. Typically, what determines the life of these batteries is # of cycles and # of deep discharges. The more extreme the environment the shorter the life time. I have network equipment sit outdoors in a cabinet. The batteries typically last 24-36 months instead of the 48-60 months I see from indoor UPSes.
- 4y ago

mindslight 4y ago

In my personal computing experience, the main value of a rack is still the density, as it is in the datacenter. Moving one or two ATX PCs, a UPS, and switch into a half height rack isn't that much of a win (compared to the floor and/or basic shelving). But double that much into a full height rack is. You don't need strictly rackmount hardware either. I just have a pair of non-rack SUA1500's sitting next to one another on the solid bottom built into the rack (not even a movable shelf). The battery type is much more common than the rackmount versions. Case wise I'd just recommend 4U all the way for full size cards, coolers, and fans. Smaller fans make more noise. Also just spend the money on cases with hot swap disk bays for any machine you plan to have more than a few drives. You'll end up wanting them sooner or later, and it's nicer to run the SATA cabling once with how cramped rack cases can get in places.

kobalsky 4y ago

> when I saw that rack mount makes things cost significantly more no way, are you telling me that a $180 rackable shelf is a scam? https://www.rackmountsolutions.net/fixed-writing-shelf/ https://www.rackmountsolutions.net/fixed-writing-shelf/

red-iron-pine 4y ago
or even the Ikea "lack rack" -- 2 x $10 ikea tables. just so happen to be the right width for servers.

outworlder 4y ago

> I quickly abandoned that idea when I saw that rack mount makes things cost significantly more. Second hand (but perfectly usable) parts. Expect more second hand enterprise items to get to the market if the economy doesn't start to boom soon. Second hand enterprise gear is usually perfectly fine in terms of longevity. Mind the noise. Get a 3d printer, print some rack adapters yourself. There's a surprising array of adapters for all sorts of devices and they work just fine for stuff that's not too heavy(like most home networking gear). If the rack itself is too expensive, you can do an Ikea Lack rack. Full size racks are easy to find (relatively, location dependent). Haven't had much luck with network racks (which was the largest my wife was comfortable with). So I bought the rack new. Still managed to fit the whole networking gear stack(none of which is racked atm, they are sitting on a rack shelf) and a ITX server (Node202, which I used as my workstation in the past, fit perfectly). You don't really want fiber optic unless you are connecting two different buildings that do not share ground. Inside the same house, ethernet works just fine. Fiber is finnicky, most home contractors don't know how to deal with it, and transceivers are expensive. More expensive than 10G usually.